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Covering 2012, Youths on the Bus

Lindsey Boerma of National Journal took notes while training to cover a presidential campaign.Credit
Philip Scott Andrews/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — A group of five fresh-faced reporters from National Journal and CBS News clicked away on their MacBooks one recent afternoon, dutifully taking notes as seasoned journalists from the campaign trail shared their rules of the road.

The journalists were mostly in their 20s, learning the basics: never get too close to a source; master the art of eating while driving; never rely on a hotel wake-up call.

For decades, campaign buses were populated by hotshots, some of whom covered politics for decades, from Walter Mears to David S. Broder to Jules Witcover. It was a glamorous club, captured and skewered in Timothy Crouse’s best-selling “The Boys on the Bus,” about the 1972 campaign.

Now, more and more, because of budget cutbacks, those once coveted jobs are being filled by brand new journalists at a fraction of the salary. It is not so glamorous anymore.

For these reporters the 2012 campaign is both the assignment of a lifetime and the kind of experience that is tying their stomachs in knots. Three of them are just out of college. One just got engaged. And none of them seem quite sure what to expect from more than a year on the road.

“We hear all this stuff, all this advice,” said Rebecca Kaplan, 23, who is giving up her apartment in Washington’s Chinatown for the duration of the campaign. “But I don’t think we’ll fully realize what’s going on until we get out there.”

Ms. Kaplan and her new colleagues, part of a joint CBS-National Journal reporting team, said they had been thinking long and hard about the fact that what they say and do carries the imprimatur of their employer.

“I thought I’m going to have to develop a personality,” said Lindsey Boerma, 23, whose biggest assignment before writing for National Journal was as editor of the Pepperdine University student paper. “But we’re not providing commentary, we’re providing coverage. And you’ve got to find that line. I haven’t quite figured it out yet.”

Preparing journalists to cover the presidential campaign these days is also an exercise in indiscretion management. In the new dynamic of campaigns, reporters themselves are targets both of political strategists as well as other journalists and bloggers.

“People are watching you,” Fernando Suarez, a CBS News reporter who covered Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, admonished the young reporters. He recounted once innocently checking his e-mail and Facebook page during a Clinton rally in Oregon. A local blogger looked over his shoulder, snapped a picture of him and then wrote an item criticizing the media for being disengaged.

“Just be smart,” Mr. Suarez added. “Now that everybody has a Flip cam, they’re looking to get you.” The young reporters nodded earnestly.

Embarrassment now comes with the swift tapping of thumbs on a BlackBerry or an off-the-cuff quip uploaded to YouTube. Helen Thomas, the trailblazing White House correspondent, saw her career come to an ignominious end last year after she made hostile comments about Israel to a rabbi who filmed the encounter and posted it on his personal Web site. CNN fired Octavia Nasr, its senior editor for Middle East affairs, after she composed a 19-word Twitter message expressing sadness after the death of the Islamic cleric Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.

In the hands of a political partisan looking to discredit a news organization, these slip-ups can become powerful and fatal ammunition. “Everything you say can and will be used against you,” said Ron Fournier, the editor-in-chief of National Journal.

Some reporters have even found their personal e-mails leaked and used against them. David Weigel, now a columnist for Slate, was pressured into leaving his job at The Washington Post last year after he attacked conservatives in private messages that found their way to a right-leaning Web site, The Daily Caller.

The willingness by some campaigns and activist groups to not just push back against the news media but to discredit and disparage is something relatively new, born of an erosion of the media’s all-powerful reputation and new technology that allows anyone with an Internet connection to be a messenger.

“The press was just a law unto itself, and there really was no way to come back against it, especially the very tightly knit cabal of political reporters,” said Richard Ben Cramer, who wrote the book “What It Takes: The Way to the White House,” an account of the 1988 election.

“Even if you had the wherewithal to embarrass a reporter, there was no mechanism to do it,” Mr. Cramer added. “And in most cases, you might as well save your breath because the reporter had no shame anyway.”

In light of this new, more perilous media climate, news organizations are counseling impulse control. At National Journal and CBS News, reporters must attach the suffix “CBSNJ” to their Twitter account names and have been directed to talk to their editors before they send out a Twitter blast.

“If Jon Huntsman drops out of the race, we want to know back at the news desk,” Caroline Horn, senior producer of politics for CBS News, told them. “We don’t want to find out about it on Twitter.”

As part of NBC’s training, campaign reporters were reminded of the time last year when two White House aides, Tommy Vietor, a spokesman at the time, and Jon Favreau, the chief speechwriter, were photographed playing beer pong at a Georgetown bar, shirts off, in an unguarded moment that went viral.

“This was unfair. This was illegitimate,” Chuck Todd, NBC News’s chief White House correspondent, recalled telling the new group of campaign reporters. “But this is the world we live in.”

Reporters have far more to worry about these days than missteps of their own making. A new generation of political activists like James O’Keefe, the conservative sabotage artist behind the hidden recordings that helped ignite outrage against Planned Parenthood, Acorn and National Public Radio, are setting traps with the goal of discrediting the media.

Mr. O’Keefe tried last year to lure a CNN correspondent aboard a boat, where he planned to make romantic advances while a hidden camera recorded the encounter. Fortunately for CNN, the correspondent got wise to the scheme and avoided what would have probably been an embarrassing moment.

Jake Tapper, the senior White House correspondent for ABC News, recently composed a tip sheet he called “13 Pieces of Campaign Advice for Young Reporters.” No. 11 on the list: Someone somewhere thinks things you say and do are interesting and reportable.

“This is an increasingly sophisticated and hazardous media world,” said Mr. Tapper, who as a rising media star often found his career and even his personal life the subject of interest by blogs and media critics. “Undermining a 27-year-old reporter — if it is in the interest of a campaign or a party that wants to discredit a news organization — it’s impossible for me to believe that’s not going to happen.”

Correction: September 2, 2011

An article on Wednesday about young reporters who are learning the basics of the campaign trail, including separating personal commentary from news coverage, referred imprecisely to a Muslim cleric whose death prompted an experienced journalist, Octavia Nasr, CNN’s senior editor for Middle East affairs, to express her sadness on Twitter, which led to her firing. While the cleric, Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, was often identified by Western governments as the spiritual mentor of Hezbollah, his direct link to the militant Islamist organization was never determined, and therefore he was not necessarily “a Hezbollah leader.” (Ms. Nasr called him “one of Hezbollah’s giants,” but he always denied having any authority over the group.)

A version of this article appears in print on August 31, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Covering 2012, Youths on the Bus. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe